[roycyang]

Overall I like it. I do agree that hosting it at your house is going to be a big barrier of entry. I WOULD do a dinner with random people but NOT in my house! Also after I signed up and added a party, there was really no clear indication of where to go next. I didn't get any confirmation or messaging or next steps. I had to go back to the dashboard and figure out that I might get an email by the 15th of the month. Is it fully functionally? Am I going to get an email tomorrow with up to five people? And what about couples ? How are you appealing to them? Couples might be more likely to do this (for example if a new couple moved to a new town), might get rid of the 'brave' factor.

[chewxy]

Hey Roy, good questions. Let me answer you now:

1) You don't have to have it in your house. It is very free form. After you have been matched up to your 5 strangers, you are shown a communications box, where you communicate with them as a host, on where and when you want to have the dinner party. It can be a lunch, it can be brekkie at the top of the hill, or it can even be a night out at the pub. That's where you describe it in the party description.

2. Not knowing where to go? That's a usability problem and it's our onus to fix it. We'll do that. The flash message that says your dinner party has been saved is clearly not doing enough. We WILL fix it.

3. Yes it is fully functional. You might get an email IF within your vicinty there are more than 10 people.

4. Couples. That's what the Plus One button is for. When you get a list of people to rank, you'll be notified if the potential attendee is bringing a Plus One.

[roycyang]

1) So after I signed up to host or join, it's really a waiting game until the 15th, right? Is there a way to make it stickier that would encourage me to come back? Some kind of game dynamics?

2) Great!

3) What happens if there are no matches? I would expect an email anyway to let me know it's still working on finding matches.

4) Okay great. Maybe it's just based on personal experience but I'd like you to flesh that out more. My wife and I throw dinner parties for our friends all the time but they are always "guests" and not "hosts" so the lack of reciprocation can be tiresome. Depending on how you figure out the secret sauce, I think people like us would be some of the early adopters/evangelists.

Have you guys thought about "ratings"? I guess you wouldn't want to introduce the idea of negatively rating someone but I think there's something to be learned from Facebook (gasp). After an event, can I like some of the other participants or something similar (+1 good dinner convo dude, etc) to rise those people to the top of the next matches and to start cultivating a community of leaders, etc.

[chewxy]

1) We will email you when you have potential matches to rank, and the subsequent matches. We designed the system to work around the lives of busy people (think young urban professionals). The whole point is for you to do your stuff and get you OUT of the site. Game dynamics would defeat the purpose. I've actually written a blog post about designing the user flow [1]. Is this a wrong decision? Probability says it is very likely that we're wrong. When the tests show so, we will pivot so.

3) We've given that some thought and we've decided against sending emails saying you're FOREVER ALONE (btw if you DO want to see it, head over to /rank-people to see how many potential matches you have. However, your insight has shown us that thought alone is not useful in making decisions. On this, I'd like a show of hands who think that it's a good idea to send update emails to tell you that the system is working on finding matches for you?

4) Haha, we've actually ran into this problem in our 2 week beta test. We're currently working on a system to incentivize users to host dinners.

5) Yes we have a post-facto rating system in place. It has questions about security, friendliness, our match qualities... In fact I can tell you there is a system that is pretty much like Xbox's TruSkill that is powering the rating system, except with more fun stuff.

[1]http://blog.strangersfordinner.com/2012/05/out-of-the-way-1-...

[sophacles]

Regarding 3:

I live in a smaller city, and it regularly takes a while for location based web stuff to catch on around here. I sign up for them, but since thresholds of usefulness take a while to be met, I completely forget about the service -- then one day I'll hear about it from someone local, decide to give it a try, and rediscover my existing account. As such I like the occasional email reminding me of the existence of these things. Preferably something in the form of:

Hey, thanks for signing up. We are still waiting for more people in your area to sign up, currently there are only n users, which doesn't quite meet our threshold[1]. We just wanted you to know we haven't forgotten about you. If you have any suggestions on how to get more users near you, let us know!

[1] alternately: n other people are using it, spread the word and get even more!

A frequency of once a week on that seems pretty reasonable, rather than once a day. In this particular situation I think a balance between "forever alone" spam and "hey, we still got your back" emails is a nice goal.

[chewxy]

I like this. It is a good suggestion. I'll look into it and discuss with the team on how to integrate something like that